Available:*
Library | Call Number | Material Type | Shelf Location | Item Barcode | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Searching... GIRARD/Girard Free Library | 92 ROTH PH | Book | Nonfiction | 30124101370890 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
Appointed by Philip Roth and granted independence and complete access, Blake Bailey spent years poring over Roth's personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and engaging Roth himself in breathtakingly candid conversations. The result is an indelible portrait of an American master and of the postwar literary scene.
Bailey shows how Roth emerged from a lower-middle-class Jewish milieu to achieve the heights of literary fame, how his career was nearly derailed by his catastrophic first marriage, and how he championed the work of dissident novelists behind the Iron Curtain.
Bailey examines Roth's rivalrous friendships with Saul Bellow, John Updike, and William Styron, and reveals the truths of his florid love life, culminating in his almost-twenty-year relationship with actress Claire Bloom, who pilloried Roth in her 1996 memoir, Leaving a Doll's House.
Tracing Roth's path from realism to farce to metafiction to the tragic masterpieces of the American Trilogy, Bailey explores Roth's engagement with nearly every aspect of postwar American culture.
Author Notes
Blake Bailey is the author of biographies of John Cheever, Richard Yates, and Charles Jackson. He is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Francis Parkman Prize from the Society of American Historians, and a finalist for the Pulitzer and James Tait Black Prizes. His previous book, The Splendid Things We Planned, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography. He lives in Virginia with his wife and daughter.
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Biographer Bailey (Cheever) brings his talents to bear in this remarkable portrait of lauded and divisive literary titan Philip Roth (1933--2018). Roth was born in Newark, N.J., in "perhaps the most anti-Semitic decade in American history" and was, according to his father, "an all-American boy who loved baseball." The Roth that Bailey brings to life is a complex mix of confidence and self-doubt; Roth became the youngest winner of the National Book Award and, Bailey writes, questioned "the whole concept of what a novel was, or what he himself was supposed to be as a writer." Bailey tirelessly unpacks the real-life inspirations behind Roth's fiction, shedding light on an early girlfriend who inspired Brenda Patimkin in his 1959 debut Goodbye, Columbus and the romantic fling who became a character 30 years later in The Human Stain. Bailey doesn't shy away from Roth's dark side, notably his self-involved nature and tendency to let "old griefs and resentments fester." In consistently luminous, humorous prose, Bailey vividly evokes Roth as a writer and a man--Roth would, for example, spend "the odd weekend" in 1964 with his girlfriend, and "by Sunday afternoons... would be almost beside himself: 'You have to leave now! I have to work!' " A stunning feat, this is as dynamic and gripping as any of Roth's own fictions. Photos. Agent: Shane Salerno. (Apr.)
Guardian Review
In response to that staple biographer's question, "when were you happiest?", Philip Roth tended to think of his first year as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, when he was free to pursue his persistent "Byronic dream" of "bibliography by day, women by night". In the six decades that followed, as Blake Bailey's compulsively readable life of the novelist reveals, this idealised schedule was generally compromised one way or another, to Roth's frequent frustration and sometime derangement. In Chicago and subsequently during his two-year national service beginning at Fort Dix, he had regular visits from his first obsessive lover, Maxine Groffsky, and he reminisced fondly to Bailey how on meeting, they would always tear each other's clothes off at the door. "I haven't done that in a while," Roth mused, aged 79. "I take them off nicely, I hang them up, I get into bed and I read. And I enjoy it as much as I enjoyed tearing the clothes off." That late-life liberation from desire is 900 pages in the making. The two great and lasting traumas of Roth's life were his marriages. He came to believe he had been trapped into both of them. First by Margaret Martinson, a waitress five years his senior, whom he had initially seduced as a "test" to see if he could charm a "shiksa blonde" and who Bailey later describes, through Roth's eyes, as "a bitter, impoverished, sexually undesirable divorcee". Martinson tricked him into a terrible union with false claims that she was pregnant, backed up with a sample of urine bought for $3 from an expectant mother in a homeless shelter, and threats of suicide if Roth should ever leave her. The second perceived "entrapment" was with the actor Claire Bloom, with whom Roth spent nearly 20 years from 1975, years that she documented in her brutally critical memoir of his role in their drama, Leaving a Doll's House. The liberations from these tortured relationships propelled the two great breakthroughs of Roth's writing career. Portnoy's Complaint was completed immediately after Martinson, from whom he was long divorced but never free, died in a car crash. His scandalously funny book - the most literal of all "coming of age" fiction - became the biggest-selling novel in the history of his publisher, Random House. It made Roth a pariah within the conservative Jewish community, and a very wealthy man. His second great literary advance coincided with recovery from the breakdown he experienced before his split from Bloom (having contemplated suicide, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital aged 60; when Bloom visited him, she was sedated and given a bed, too). The subsequent release expressed itself first in the extraordinary priapic howl of Sabbath's Theater in 1995, and then in the peerless trilogy of novels beginning with American Pastoral which won Roth every award going - apart from the Nobel prize that he deserved and coveted (for years, a large part of the annual "fun in Stockholm", Bailey suggests, seemed to consist of snubbing Roth). In between times, through much of his midlife career, his principal fictional subject was himself, as he tried different alter egos on for size. In many ways, as Bailey's book argues, there should be no surprise in this self-absorption, since Roth contained brilliantly conflicted multitudes. There was a capacity for great kindness to friends and family, but also spectacular selfishness in pursuit of his art; he could be the best company and the worst ("I know that I am a holy terror to live with if I haven't been writing steadily"). He was rooted in the small-town values in the Newark of his youth, and had no compunction in wickedly dismantling them (to his father's dismay he renounced Judaism the day after his bar mitzvah, subsequently declaring his faith to be "polyamorous humorist"). Bailey notes that his fictional selves, Nathan Zuckerman and the rest, often showed Roth in the worst possible light. "Why not?" Roth asked. "Literature is not a moral beauty contest." If he was in thrall to his libido, he was also chained to the thrumming necessities of fulfilling his gifts as a writer. Roth described the perpetual "overcommitment" of writing fiction as an intensity that "kills you and makes you all at once". Near death, Bailey observes, the author would lie in bed at night and try to remember every person he had known and "out of ancient habit" begin to rise to write about them before recalling with relief that he wasn't "slavishly hearkening, day or night, to the demands of his talent any more". Bailey was recommended to Roth as a biographer by his sharp and empathic book about that other self-destructive truth-teller, John Cheever. "I don't want you to rehabilitate me," Roth told him. "Just make me interesting." Bailey duly gives illuminating depth and context to what Roth liked to present as "the facts" of his "life as a man" while reserving moral judgment. He is guilty at times, perhaps, of taking the grand male passions described by Roth a little too much in earnest. While Roth is allowed his adolescent infatuations and changes of heart, his jilted lovers and their capsized lives are sometimes implicitly dismissed as dull or hysterical. One alcoholic and suicidal young lover, "Sylvia", intrigues Roth as a "cultural primitive"; innumerable other liaisons allowed him to indulge My Fair Lady fantasies of education with benefits. His 18-year affair with Inga Larsen (not her real name) - the model for the object of Mickey Sabbath's lust in Sabbath's Theater - ended when she divorced her husband and moved in with him. "She's a great adultress, but not a great mate," Roth noted in a letter. "The same was arguably true of Roth," Bailey suggests (that "arguably" is one of the few redundant words in his beautifully written book). It was one of the curiosities (and perhaps sadnesses) of Roth's life - not least because of the amount of urgent sex that he crammed in between his 31 books - that he did not have children of his own. Toward the end of his life, he formed a deep sentimental attachment to the young twins of one former lover, Julia Golier, who became his co-executor. His last recorded words here are to Golier at his hospital bedside, "I loved your kiddos," Roth said, "they were the joy of my life." He left them a significant legacy in his will. A lot of the rest went to the local public library in Newark, where he first began to conjure a question that never left him: "What made me the writer?" It is hard to imagine a book that will come up with a more definitive series of answers than this one.
Kirkus Review
An acclaimed biographer turns his attention to the author he has called America's "greatest living novelist." Philip Roth (1933-2018) was famous enough to socialize with the likes of Frank Sinatra and Claudette Colbert; at one point, he turned down the advances of recently widowed Jackie Kennedy. In this excellent biography, Bailey offers an evenhanded portrait of an author whose many admirers include authors Nicole Krauss, Edna O'Brien, and Zadie Smith but whose depictions of women in novels such as Portnoy's Complaint and Sabbath's Theater infuriated others. For example, in 2011, his Man Booker International Prize spurred one of the judges--Carmen Callil, founder of the feminist Virago Press, the English publisher of Leaving a Doll's House, the scathing memoir by Roth's ex-wife, Claire Bloom--to resign in protest. Roth gave Bailey access to his archive and sat down for interviews, and it shows, especially in the many intimate details about Roth's personal life: his Jewish upbringing in Newark; his friendships and rivalries with John Updike, William Styron, and other contemporaries; his ailments, from lifelong back trouble to coronary artery disease, for which he preferred a bypass over beta blockers because the medicine made him impotent; and his many affairs, including while married to Bloom. Bailey offers positive and negative assessments of Roth's books, from describing Goodbye, Columbus as "a kind of Jewish Gatsby, given the charm of its prose and humor, its concision, and its theme of meretricious American-style success," to calling out the "breathtaking tastelessness toward women" in The Great American Novel. While Bailey notes that Roth may not have been the misogynist some would believe, he doesn't shy away from pointing out his flaws and blind spots--e.g., when Roth referred to the "ghastly pansy rhetoric" of Edward Albee's play Tiny Alice in a 1965 review or when he organized a party for Bloom's 62nd birthday with his married lover in attendance. An outstanding biography of a prolific author for whom writing was "a ghastly protracted slog." Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
The rapport between Philip Roth and award-winning literary biographer Bailey is immediately apparent in this fully authorized, comprehensive, and engrossing chronicle of a driven, complicated, and contentious artistic life. Roth's voice, by turns funny, furious, anguished, erudite, and reconciled, is heard throughout Bailey's flowing, vivid, and precise account, beginning with Roth's contented Newark childhood as a "flashy, grade-skipping wunderkind." We witness the blossoming of Roth's ardor for women and satire in college, the source of his chronic back pain, and the jump-start to his success in 1960 when Roth became the youngest writer to receive the National Book Award. Bailey tracks the creation of each of Roth's 31 books during two traumatic marriages and a constant stream of affairs, detailing how Roth audaciously and provokingly mined his experiences and relationships to fuel radical fiction that ranged from flagrant to prescient and aroused high praise and vehement criticism. Accused of being an anti-Semitic Jew, a misogynist, a subversive, and a vulgarian, he deployed confounding alter egos and dug deeply into his own and America's psyche. As Bailey details Roth's publishing deals, teaching stints, love of solitude, and devotion to craft as a "fanatic reviser," he places Roth's protean achievements within the history of American literature, and traces the arc of his work from shocking to profound, forging a consummate and unforgettable biography of a controversial, virtuoso, and indelible American writer.
Library Journal Review
In the years before his death in 2018, Philip Roth was often acclaimed as America's greatest living writer. In this comprehensive biography, Bailey (Cheever: A Life) takes on the task of untangling the details of the author's life from his often semi-autobiographical fiction. Bailey presents Roth as a talented and dedicated writer who is increasingly sensitive to his reputation. Driven by his ego and his libido, Roth's life was marked by his prolific literary output and his many romantic relationships. Bailey is a sympathetic biographer, often dismissive of charges of misogyny in Roth's writing and clearly favoring Roth's account of his fraught and highly publicized relationship with the actress Claire Bloom. This work is evidence of Bailey's exhaustive research and unique access to his subject; Roth selected Bailey as his biographer, and the two had extensive interviews in preparation for the book. VERDICT For an author like Roth, who put so much of his own life into his books, this biography is an essential companion to his novels, enabling readers to discover the true-life inspirations for many of his memorable characters and scenes. Recommended for readers who have read and enjoyed Philip Roth's fiction.--Nicholas Graham, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill